“Hey,” he answers.
“You had to work late.” I notice his clothes are rumpled.
“Yeah.” Sebastian walks over to the bar and makes us drinks.
I sit on our beige couch and pull my knees into myself. He takes his time making the drinks and I retreat into myself wondering if all marriages are this...distant. If there are normal marriages where the couples sit in the same room and are so inaccessible to each other they might as well be in two different time zones. That’s how I feel. I loved him once.
“How was your day?” I try.
“Fine,” he answers handing me a drink. It’s a martini. I hate martinis, but he’s never even bothered to ask and I never bothered to tell him. I take a sip.
This is how things usually go for us if I am still awake when he gets home. I usually take three sleeping pills and have passed out prior to him gracing the house with his presence. He stares at the TV, baseball highlights are on.
Sip.
Why do I still need his affection?
Gulp.
Why do I break every time he refuses to acknowledge me?
Cough. I wipe my mouth.
His eyes trap mine and hold them. I feel like the whiskey-colored eyes builds bars around me and I can’t move, I don’t even try anymore. I capitulated to him years ago and made my peace with it. I blink. He doesn’t.
The funny thing about being petrified is that no one around you notices you’re there, but you are there seeing everything, learning everything. You are a fossil of what you used to be, the problem is I’ve forgotten what I used to be.
I left.
I escaped.
I feel pride and fear and pain.
Currently, I’m in a hotel and I use that term loosely, with Bash on the bed next to me. A dirty smell hangs in the air as if I shouldn’t be here. There is a light that’s glaring at me through the window as I stare at a TV showing moms on a cooking show.
Bash snores lightly and rolls on his side and I smile at him. It’s foreign to me that I can smile, that after leaving my husband that my lips can move at all. I haven’t cried today. I believe I might be all cried out. I doze in and out while listening to the soothing freedom of people doing what they want to do. I only have two hundred dollars cash and I had to pull cash from Sebastian’s jeans over the last six months. Did you know that even if you have cash you still have to show your ID for a hotel room?
A few months ago I tried to get a loan so that I could get started back with my jewelry. My credit was so low I couldn’t even get a credit card with a limit of three hundred dollars. Baffled, I looked online and found that every bill that we had in my name had been paid late. He’d done this on purpose. Sebastian strategically ruined everything about me and this was just one more piece of the puzzle that I didn’t know he was trying to complete.
I moved through life with an innocence that I wanted to be a good wife, mother, person, but I was paired with someone who played a different game every day, every hour. He’d strategically taken everything from me and I was just now understanding the lengths he would go through to accomplish his task, to get a win.
I put a hand on Bash to calm my racing heart as the air conditioning turned off with a clanking rattle. My eyes close with the comfort that it was just us. I could make it if I had Bash.
The door opening startled me out of my slumber. My heart skips a beat and I look to the clock to see it’s after midnight.
“Rebecca dear, you’ve put the bar on. Come let me in,” his voice makes my blood boil and then freeze. The liquid that once ran through my veins stops and my body quits functioning.
I can’t move. I glance over my shoulder at Bash, still sleeping peacefully.
“Baby, come let me in.”
I’m silent. Maybe he’ll go away.
“No, she’s really hard to wake up,” I hear him tell someone.
He found me and I don’t know how. I used cash. I don’t understand. I thought I planned enough.
“Rebecca, baby. Come let me in please.” Sebastian’s voice is silky and smooth and masks the tremor of madness underneath.
I sit up. The light is still in my eye and I walk to the door. Pushing the bar back, I open the door and there is Sebastian with the clerk. I wipe my hand over my eyes.
“Hey babe, I just got here. You put the bar across and I couldn’t get in,” he repeats.
I step back from the door.
The clerk is looking at me and I urge her to see how this is not right. That I paid with cash for a reason, that just because I don’t scream and yell and call the cops that I’m not okay. I was anything, but okay. I would die at his hand, if not tonight, sometime. I just needed to make it long enough to protect Bash. I didn’t know how long that would be, but I had to try.
Sebastian closes the door behind him and he took me by both of my hands. His hands are soft, but firm.
“Rebecca, I’m disappointed in your stupidity. I didn’t marry you because you were stupid. I chose you because you would realize what your position is with me.”
I’m silent. There’s nothing to say. I will try again, next time I’ll drive farther from him. Next time I’ll be smarter.
“You belong to me. If you plan on leaving me you better do something smarter than this.” He waves his hands around the cheap hotel with a window air unit. “Come on let’s go.”
“No.”
I’m taken aback, the words escape my lips before I can stop them.
“No?” he’s incredulous.
I know I will go with him. I’d hoped to escape, but he found me. “How did you find me?”
“I can find you anywhere you go.”
Every time I make a mistake, I learn.
“Get my boy and let’s go home.”
“Can we just…” I started.
“Can we just what?”
“I just…we…I need to figure out a way to live like this. I can’t live like this.”
His eyes soften on me. “Rebecca I can make this as easy or as hard as you’d like it to be. We can agree on how to move forward, but you need to know you won’t leave me. I won’t let you.”
He watches as I lift Bash from the bed trying to keep him from waking up. He holds the door open as I walk out. He drags my bags behind him as he follows me to our cars, parked side by side.
“I’ll drive Bash home.” He takes my baby from me and leaves me standing in the parking lot of a hotel in the middle of an exit surrounded by truck stops.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Miss the Misery
The first year of our marriage I was a shadow of my former self. It took me by surprise. I was placating and scared, although I found myself conducting small acts of rebellion. I longed for when Sebastian looked at me like he wanted to devour me. Now I’m his wife and he looks at other women the way he used to look at me. I reflect on my decisions, my delusions and my needs. There is a void where my needs used to be. I found out I was pregnant three months into our sham of a marriage. I thought that would fix everything, fix me. Life turned to quicksand and even when I think I have my footing stable, the ground shifts and I sink farther into the earth. It threatens to swallow me and I wonder sometimes why I just don’t let it.
I rub my enormous belly unconsciously and pour all my love into the little bean growing. I pray that all of my decisions won’t collapse in on me. I want this baby. I need this baby. This baby will save me. I regret all the things I’ve lost. I used to be fun. I was pretty. I was…I stop this train of thinking because it doesn’t really matter what I was. I am pathetic. I am a shell of a human. I will change. This baby will change me.
A foot rolls in my stomach and jabs me in what I believe to be my kidney. I flinch in excitement. It reminds me of all the things I didn’t fully appreciate with Laney. She died after carrying her only five months and three days because of my incompetent cervix. It was like my body isn’t even competent to carry a baby. So I had to deliver her even though she was dead.
A door slams as I sink into the only chair I’ve purchased so far for our new home so I pop back up quickly. I hate this house that Sebastian bought, but I love the land it’s on. The house itself is cold and empty, like my marriage. Like my husband. Glancing at my watch, I realize what time it is and wonder where the time has gone, I haven’t really done anything today. Hurriedly, I rush into the kitchen and pull open the oven like I’ve been slaving for hours. I pull out the chicken parmesan that I bought from a restaurant and pretended to cook. The noodles are bubbling away and I look out the window into the back yard as I pull out plates.
Sebastian enters the kitchen with a smile, his dimple on full display. He pulls me into an embrace and murmurs into my hair something that I ignore. As he drops to his knees, his hands go to my belly. I run my hands through his hair and my delusion clicks into place where he loves me, where I love him. These lines blur. Then the life I want appears in front of me and I grab it with two hands and wrap my legs around it.
Sebastian picks me up and lifts me to the counter, even at nine months pregnant.
He says things he thinks I want to hear. I lean my head back and stare at the ceiling.
He grunts and thrusts into me. I meet every rocking motion. My heels hit the cabinets beneath me at a steady beat.
“You’re perfect,” he moans in my ear.
He thinks I’m an idiot.
My rage consumes me, fills me and burns me from the inside out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Satin Blinders
I sit on my back porch and stare at the trees for so long they begin to meld into other things. I can no longer tell the needles on the fir trees from the leaves of the maple trees. The sun peeks in and out at me from behind a bulbous cloud and melts the remaining spring frost on the table next to me. A cashmere blanket is wrapped around my shoulders and my coffee long ago ceased being drinkable. A chasm opened in my mind a few days ago pulling me down into an abyss that I refused to acknowledge for several years. It has grown so big that I now only sit and watch the hole spread. My sanity is slowly leaving me. Retreating in a casual way not to cause any suspicion to anyone, but I’m afraid an hour from now there will not be any refuge left from it. That I’ll just have to jump in headfirst and hope there is something to cushion my fall.
It wasn’t always this way. I wasn’t always this...plastic or fucked up. I used to have dreams that didn’t include making it through the day without discovering another lie. Our wedding day was one of the most perfect days. I wore a Reem Acra dress, it was flawless. The fabric tight in the bodice with a flower made of fabric on my waist, the skirt flowed in a way that made me feel like a queen. I was a queen that day and I married a king. He ruled my heart and life so completely I could have never known what was to come. My blonde hair was gathered over my left shoulder to leave the low back exposed. I had on diamond teardrop earrings that I borrowed from my best friend Jessica. My dress was my new, of course. I was wearing royal blue Manolo Blahniks underneath my satin river of a dress.
We were married in a church we attended when we both were in Clemson, South Carolina. By the time we got married, Sebastian had moved to Atlanta while he worked at some engineering company and waited for me to graduate. He’d proposed a year after we started dating, but we waited until after my graduation to get married. Everything was seamless that day. The location, which was on campus, served our friends and family perfectly. I felt like the stars were aligned for what would be an impeccable life.
It was very quickly after this farce of a ceremony that I realized that my life would never be as I imagined. Well, maybe I didn’t learn that lesson right off, but I knew my dream wouldn’t happen without compromise and consequences in which I wasn’t quite prepared. Maybe I put shiny blinders on and told myself that these things happen and people come back from it all the time. I told myself marriage is hard and I would work tirelessly on it. I wouldn’t be like my mom and have five marriages under my belt. People are complicated. That’s pretty much the understatement of the year.
My phone rings, pulling me out of the delusion that was once my memory and I knock back my ice cold coffee. My leather clad hands shake as I answer.
Sebastian wraps his hands around my waist and pulls me into his body. “I’m so sorry,” he pleads. I want to believe him, so I do. “I don’t know why I did that, Rebecca. You know I love you. I think I may have a problem.”
I run my hands through his hair. Then I stop, because he had sex with someone other than me and I don’t know if I can get through that. I’m three months pregnant and he fucked someone else. I had to acknowledge this one and somehow it feels different. The reality of it chips away at my delusion of happiness.
Maybe he’s the problem, not me. Maybe it’s not that no man will ever be faithful to me. Maybe…
I feel the pressure of the past few months explode in my brain, bits of myself fly across the room and get stuck on the art that I picked out at local markets. The dream of my marriage slides down the tile backsplash of the kitchen. I squint my eyes against the scene. I know it’s not real. I wonder for the millionth time if I’m losing my mind. I barely trust myself anymore.
“Rebecca, do you forgive me?”
I shake my head.
“What can I do, baby? What can I do, I can’t lose you.”
“Stop fucking other people,” I respond.
His head shifts back slowly, like he couldn’t believe I actually said it.
I glare at him.
“Stop pretending you aren’t married.”
He stands up, his head hanging in shame. “I’ll do anything. I love you. I need you.”
We stare at each other in some bizarre standoff that I’m not sure what it means. He blinks first and walks to the kitchen pouring us both glasses of wine. I stare at him, then the wine.
I step backward so that the wall supports my back because I’m unsure how I’m still standing. He stays in the kitchen, like he can tell he shouldn’t approach the wounded animal.
“What do you want from me?” The words escape my lips before I realize I’ve thought them. I feel like I’m underwater and I can’t move quick enough.
“I want to be better for you,” he answers. He lies. I want him to lie.
“Then do it.”
“I promise to be better. To do better.”
“I’ll leave Sebastian.” I lie.
He tries to hide the smile, but I see it and I want to punch him in the face for knowing me so well. “I will be better.”
I wonder if it means a better husband, a better man, or a better liar.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Losing it
“I’ve often wondered if people know when they are losing their minds. Now, I can confirm...not until it’s too late.”
“Rebecca,” my mother coos over the phone. “Come home dear. You sound like you need a break. Bring Bash with you.”
“Mother, do you realize that my entire life, well I guess only thirteen years of my life, has been a complete façade?” I haven’t spoken to Mom in a really long time and usually when I do I have my game face on. I’ve told her everything was fine since I moved to Oregon. Fine is probably the worst word to describe anything. People say things are fine when they have no idea how to describe what they have just seen, read, heard or how they feel. I’m always “fine.”
“Yes dear, I probably realized that before you did.”
I sigh into the phone. This wasn’t true, I’d just become such an impeccable actor I’d even convinced myself that I was happy.
“Rebecca, come home and we’ll sort this whole thing out.”
“This ‘whole thing’ is my life and Bash’s life and I...”
“The problem is you are raising a son that looks at you like you should be treated the way you are. Is that what you want? A son that uses people and lies to people the way you’ve been used and lied to dear?”
“Quit fucking calling me dear,” I explode. She does this when she’s right. I m
ean why can’t people just be right and help instead of being condescending. If she knew the truth of my life I think she’d disown me. I need someone, something. I need help. I…
“First of all, language. Secondly, I’m simply trying to help. You should let me. I’m pretty sure I’m all you’ve got.”
I hear a rumbling around me and boulders of my psyche begin to crumble. The tenuous life that I continued to pretend I had here shakes with fervor. An earthquake threatens the family that was comprised of a pathological liar and a son who hates my existence sometimes and a mother that has lost her grip on reality. When I’m slapped in the face with the truth of my situation, I have no one. A sob bubbles to the surface and cannot be contained.
“Rebecca, I’m serious. Come home. I’ll book the flights for you myself.”
“I’m in trouble,” I exhale these words as the phone drops from my hand and I sink to the floor. Despair is not an easy fix, but a long term condition that settles in every pore of your body and right now it was all I had. I hear my mother calling me from my phone that slid under the couch in its attempt to get away from me. I stare up at the clock in our immaculate den with comfortable beige couches and navy throw pillows for pops of color. I crawl to where my phone taunts me and hit the disconnect button. Then I text.
I dropped my phone. Sorry. I’ll call you later. I have to pick up B from baseball.
My head hangs in utter defeat for three minutes. I know it was that long because I have to leave the house at 7:23 to get to the arena five minutes early and that’s exactly what I do.
He pulls me in close to his body and it was different than I expected, there was no give. It was pure muscle, the ridges of his body make me feel small and somewhat insignificant. His hand drifts up my back and into the tangled ends of my hair. The gentle pull he gives forces my face up to his. His eyes focus on my lips, but mine are lost in the distinct color of his irises. They reminded me of sunflowers, with pupils being the dark center of the flower and around it curved and weaved colors of yellows and browns. I blink. I’d never seen his eyes this close and they have an animalistic quality to them. His lips land on mine as his palms skirt down my lower back to my ass.
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